Getting the best developers available

Getting things to grow is a joy for many. Last spring my house was filled with plants, growing from seeds to full grown plants. I don’t know if it’s true that your own tomatoes taste better. But it was fun.

Getting things to grow is also hard work, about being patient and knowing what you’re doing. Yelling at plants or presenting them with a time line does not make them grow harder. Well, yes, breathing on plants do have some effect but that does not help if you’ve watered them too little or too much.

To summarize: it’s easier to kill a plant than to make it grow.

It is also easier to kill the creativity of a developer than grooming it and building it. Yes, there are developers not worth the name as there are plants that will never grow. But if we ignore that problem (before discussed on my previous blog), you must think that you have a number of developers and that you should everything to make them the best developers available. But what am I talking about? Well, if you have the developer Brad. There is Brad and you should make your best enabling him to the best that he can be. How you do that is up to you, your organization and the person in question. Agile methodologies include many tools enabling developers becoming the best version of themselves. But like with plants, individuals need to be considered just as such. And if you instead want the worst available developer, try following the advice of Geek Daily. In an earlier post, the reader who is a developer himself can also read some advice on how you can become the worst developer that you can be. It is so easy.

Franco Trindade also discusses a perspective on getting the best team effort and how we often are schooled and rewarded into preferring individual achievements rather than team success. His post is called The forces of Destruction, after a citation by W E Deming. For example, we’re individually graded in school.